As for the difference, there's a lot more Learned Helplessness in the Republic of Gilead than there is in, say, northern Europe. 🤷‍♂️

Why do things need to improve, generally speaking?

It influences folks subconsciously, which in legal proceedings with a significant public relations component, is powerful and effective. It's even better to influence people without their conscious awareness that it's happening. And yes, some folks aren't taken in by it, but a surprising number are. It would be tantamount to legal malpractice not to advise your client to try. 🙄

Jag känner igen en hel del av det du berättar. När jag var ung så ville jag mestadels att man låtar mig i fred. Tyvärr har många ingen aning vad man ska göra med någon "annorlunda" som de verkligen inte förstår, särskilt när de också är unga.

Jag är inte alls övertygad på att ett annat jobb kommer ge dig en bekvämmare omgivning, men du får kanske lyckas hitta folk som uppskattar dig för dina skillnader. Det hoppas jag på i alla fall.

Peace.

You don't need to study axioms in order to accept them, but once you accept them, then you must accept any soundly derived conclusion from them. Belief doesn't need to be logically consistent, but knowledge does.

As for investing significant time and energy, I would say that that depends on things such as the length of the chain of reasoning or the difficulty/cost of testing a hypothesis or how closely observations match your intuition. Some knowledge is cheap to acquire, such as "the sun rises in the east", because we can observe it directly and we can clearly identify the direction of east and the sun's path in the sky is very stable from day to day.

I have drunk some decades old bottles of wine. I was worried each time that the bottle had become undrinkable, but not that it had become dangerous.

Belief regards opinions, in which people have a free choice to accept or reject the idea. There is no notion of rightness or wrongness.

Knowledge regards conclusions from a set of axioms, in which people who accept the axioms are honor-bound to accept the conclusions. To reject the conclusion while accepting the axioms would be wrong.

In my life, this governs when I can freely choose and when I am obliged to accept a claim based on whether I've accepted previous claims.

I have worked this schedule at a job I disliked. Never more than about 32 hours from time off felt amazing.

Of the ones I tried to read, Atlas Shrugged, and it's not even close.

Never program a computer you can't unplug.

Canadian. Didn't see this option yet. Anyone else?

As a young person with an interest in languages and an eye towards working professionally as a computer programmer, I found this story especially delightful. It was one of the ones that led me to read more Clarke.

And the parenthetical near the end hit me even harder than the last line did.

Chronologically LOST.

Write comments that explain why the code isn't obvious just by reading it. Why did you do things the long way? What did you need to work around? Why didn't you do the thing that anyone reading the code would expect you to do?

Also write comments that explain the purpose of the functions you use, in case the names of those functions don't make it clear on their own.

I find it uncomfortable not to understand. It has taken me decades to make peace with the notion that being different is not only acceptable, but good. Many people don't get me, but the ones who do become friends for life. Many people find things interesting or enjoyable that would make me cry from boredom.

I've chosen to find it charming.

You might be able to do that, too. If not now, then one day. It took me a long time.

Peace.

APL is Ithkuil.

How delightful it will be the first time one of them defends themself with "I was born this way".

The Handmaid's Tale

We

Nightfall

The Terminal Experiment

The fact that the loop is doing "find first driver matching these strange criteria" seems most obviously obscured by the pattern of assigning a value, then killing the loop or not. This strikes me as the part that makes the algorithm tedious to test, since it forces us to use a collection to test the intricacies of the inner conditions.

Once we isolate "find first driver matching condition" from computing the condition for each driver, I consider the rest a question of personal taste. Specification pattern, composition of filters, something like that. Whatever you find easier to follow.